Flying Cargo Vehicle Automates Deliveries up to 600 Miles

An eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) vehicle company this week unveiled its next-generation vehicle designed to automate the loading and unloading of packages.

The electric aerial vehicle (EAV) by MightlyFly has cargo doors that open and close automatically, receive and eject packages into and out of the cargo area and sense and compute weight and balance.

The entire process is done without anyone repositioning the packages inside the vehicle. 

“We are very excited to show everyone the tremendous work and ingenuity performed by the MightyFly team throughout the last year, and to unveil the 2024 Cento that couples innovation with efficiency in design, maintenance and operation, bringing to the world the key to transform the expedited logistics market,” said Manal Habib, co-founder and CEO of MightyFly.

The flying vehicle is the company’s third generation and comes with a larger cargo bay area allowing for larger packages and goods, including the traditional cooler boxes used to transport donor organs for transplantation.

The EAV is targeted to “logistics, supply chain, manufacturing, health care, pharmaceutical, retail, automotive and oil and gas industries, for national and state parks, humanitarian and disaster relief organizations and for defense and nondefense governmental agencies,” according to the company.

Related:Flying Vehicle Company Aims to Move Cargo Better

The unveiling event this week was held at the MightyFly headquarters in San Leandro, California, and featured demonstrations of the EAV’s capabilities to partners, investors, potential customers and government representatives.

Later this year, MightyFly plans to publicly debut its autonomous cargo delivery flights in Michigan, demonstrating point-to-point autonomous delivery use cases.

MightlyFly recently received a $1.25 million contract from AFWERX, the innovation arm as part of the Air Force Research Laboratory with an annual budget of $1.4 billion.

AFWERX plans to work to streamline the small business innovation research (SBIR) and small business technology transfer (STTR) processes and to create faster proposals to award timelines for small businesses.

An additional goal is to eliminate bureaucratic overhead by continuous process improvement changes in contract execution.  

MightyFly was started in 2019 and is funded by Draper Associates, At One Ventures, 500 Startups, Global Founders Capital, Graph Ventures, Halogen Ventures and Side Door Ventures.

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Related:Self-Flying Cargo Aircraft Funded to Test Automatic Deliveries